On the Broken Backs of Others

Between the Screens, ink on paper, copyright 1996 GPD

Guns became a necessity of meat, a sacrament for the running gun profiler and his racist fog creeping. Plaster Indians shout to us from the store fronts: eradicate! All the statues come to life; our first and last lady of liberty beckons.

‘Come to my open wound, live like a parasite

In the warmth of my intestine.’

WELCOME

You’ve got a life to kill.

Let’s just hook you up.

Assembly is easy.

‘I am white, like the living god of the new parasites.

I am white, shining from scar to scar!

I am white living in congealed maggot colonies of idiot hypnotism.’

This cockroach of a man- this mucoid individual- Mr. Whitesonofabitch, smells new burning tobacco and gasoline with his big moustache nose and downloads in his pants. Paid props in masks of fake outrage give running mouthjobs to placate anyone worried about his viral seed.

‘My property gurgles like a tracheotomy…’

It’s television-like and history’s into reruns as sure as the disease out of control.

Running red hanging, there has to be a trophy, a swinging tribute to distended guts, to boring and increasingly lonesome whiteness. Bland disharmonics, drip, drip, drip…

Polished skin, dense like rubber, next to more skin on top of other skin piled in a container. This man, this monarch of the maggot pile, has them dragged out one by one and nails them to experimental crosses. His doctors peel back their pink, fatty layers to reveal the valuable light within the blight.

He gives out dignity like sympathy letters… but it’s not dignity. It’s not anything you can recognize.

The older gentleman sits in his small quarters, his greased wire hair is damp. He remembers the shotguns poised at his pissing child and the rat king, Mr. Whitesonofabitch, smiling up and through dead eyes- like through a thousand leagues of polluted water- eyes connected to a brain that fits a strict social order over everything like an airtight lid. The gentleman sighs, sitting on the dirt floor, his polished skin dense and dark and tough like black rubber. He whittles a small femur into a bone-white effigy. He knows that Mr. Whitesonofabitch lives in a world that appears much closer than it really is.

There is no more legitimate opportunity. Only opportunity that exists is won by gun or woven out of magic. Scruples, economy, politics. Peasant living: Master’s hand in Peasant’s mouth- he won’t bite; he knows better. He’d better operate under cover of blindness.

Guns became a necessity of life to protect the isolated, the margins, to protect the running sore trouble of greedy life processes.

Living regret.

Networks now fuel what was once well-begun in a bloody field, in a chamber of torment. Let us remember.

Leaves and sunshine kiss the church steps. An old hymn grips the ears; now, being drowned by a rebellion of murky angels. Living trench-warfare open fire on the citizens while Mr. Whitesonofabitch gets his hot shit transplant; a procedure that aids functioning endorsed by reputable surgeons.

The ancient war rages on the street.

You see, Mr. Whitesonofabitch, before he had his plush new insides, bought my skin off the bargain rack where I was hanging next to the copper colored flesh of an unfortunate, insignificant other. Our empty wallets unified us. Breath to breath to breath; we’ll be avenged.

Houses on fire dot the plantation horizon… there are no helicopters. No nothing… but the pure, meaty smoke swirling above Mr. Whitesonofabitch’s smoldering body. No life for the living more than running labor sores suppurating malaria dreams. The payoff used to be tobacco money for a plateful of dirty cornbread…. cheap life, consumer index under whips, walls, fences and disease. He’s got a corner on the market.